Kate Casanova is an interdisciplinary visual artist who lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2013. Her work examines what it means to be a human animal in a non-human world. Her exhibition record includes the Beijing New Media Triennial, the Gallery at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York, and the Kolman & Pryor Gallery in Minneapolis. For more info visit KateCasanova.com.
 
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Kate Casanova creates visceral worlds in which sensation trumps language; where unconscious yearning seethes beneath skin and under tongues. In these surreal landscapes, fungi grow out of furniture, crustaceans crawl on heads, land masses float in spacelessness. Hair, crystals, lava, fur, and ice become textures that fold into themselves, expand and contract in an ever shifting state of becoming. Insects swarm, vines overtake, and eggs burst. Fueled by a mythos of visual and material seduction, these world offers up an alluring entropy that pulses with the crushing proliferation of life.
 
Casanova’s poetic work examines human perceptions of the natural world. She blends conceptual and process-based methodologies freely, equally inspired by ideas and material. Her interdisciplinary practice oscillates between sculpture, video, performance, and collage – a result of both intuition and experimentation.
 
Conceptually, Casanova is influenced by a range of theoretical concerns, from Posthumanism and Phenomenology to cultural theories of kitsch, affect, space, the body, and rhizomes. For example, the Mushroom Chair series explores Posthumanism, a philosophy which repositions humans as merely one species among many. In these works, upholstered chairs are overtaken by living oyster mushrooms that sprout from the cushions. The fungi feed off an artifact from human culture invoking the ephemeral nature of living beings.
 
Informed by Phenomenology, a field of philosophy that posits that it is through our bodies that we come to know ourselves and our surroundings, the video performance titled, Ornament, features three hermit crabs traversing the artist’s ornately braided head. While the figure remains reverently still, the crabs investigate this foreign terrain. Each species senses the other in a direct, corporeal way. In a role reversal for our species, the human body becomes the landscape and the crabs, the subjects.
 
Casanova’s work both reveals and confronts human perceptions of nature. By exploring human responses to natural phenomenon such as attraction and repulsion, awe and unease, she allows us to question how we assign value to the more-than-human world.

Itamar Jobani official site

Edina Tokodi official site | Edina Tokodi on Twitter

Edina Tokodi is an installation and graphic artist from Hungary. Tokodi studied graphic arts and printmaking at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and later moved to New York where she founded Mosstika, a creative studio that incorporates plant life and other materials found in the local natural environment with photos or graphic elements to dissolve the barriers between private and public space, the organic and inorganic elements of the urban landscape, and nature and art. Tokodi has been featured in numerous publication such as The New York Times’ T Magazine and Lens Blog, Wooster Collective, Dwell, Gothamist, Ballista Magazine, Inhabitat, and Greenopolis. Her work has been exhibited all over the United States, including in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Scottsdale, and San Francisco, and abroad in Budapest, London, Berlin, Tokyo, and Milan. Tokodi currently resides and works out of Brooklyn, New York.

Born in 1985, Leah grew up in the rural backwoods of upstate New York, in a town with a single stop sign. Naturally, she moved to the biggest, fastest city in the USA where she received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2009. Since then, her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in galleries, museums, and art fairs, and discussed in publications including The Paris Review, PMc Magazine, and Visual Overture. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Metamorphosis was part of an exhibit exploring notions surrounding the transformation of human beings into stars. The mythology of nearly every ancient civilization includes stories where humans turn into constellations. That fantastic metamorphosis is both seductive and frightening; you become an eternal, dazzling being of light, but at what cost? This painting depicts human bodies in flux. They are simultaneously melding into a larger whole, and breaking apart into their individual forms. There is no final destination, only an uncertain journey.
 

Leah Yerpe official site

ARTIST STATEMENT:
This photograph is part of a series of New York Street photos in the sense that the figure’s interior (life) has merged with the exterior (street). The boundary between the subject and the background is blurred, the faces distorted or sometimes completely lost, and while the subjects still retain some of their inherit qualities, their individual identities are lost.
 
The photographs are the collision of the internal with the external, the private with the public, which produces the contradictions inherit in modern New York life.
 
http://jonathanauch.com

Working in a truly collaborative style, 3MB takes the phrase “art collective” seriously. These works are collectively rendered. This is not a group show. These paintings are pulled from the collective consciousness of the individuals and their shared — though often separate — experiences. Though they work without a formula, Toby Goodshank explains their process saying, “We all attack the canvas simultaneously.” Adam Green elaborates that these works are born from “surreal, cartoony, and post-modern ideas that were floating around, and we didn’t feel ashamed to illustrate them, as though we were playing a game together.”